


Plant your hope (in thistle and weeds)

by rawthorne (noisette)



Category: Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-07-23
Updated: 2011-07-23
Packaged: 2017-10-21 16:48:10
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,017
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/227412
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/noisette/pseuds/rawthorne
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In which Arya knows she owes her life to the Mother of Dragons even as home calls to her from beyond the sea.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Plant your hope (in thistle and weeds)

**Author's Note:**

> Written for prompt at hbto_gotfiction: Arya/Daenerys – she is a solider and a traitor but she is devoted to the dragon queen and nothing can be done now. – any rating.
> 
> For purposes of this story, Arya is sixteen. Title borrowed from the song _Thistle & Weeds_ by Mumford & Sons.

The third letter finds her by ship. A trading galley in the last port sacked by the horde before the turn of the moon carries chests of silver and gold, spools of silk and lace—and a piece of parchment concealed between two jeweled casks of saffron. The Bear finds it and brings it to the queen before her very eyes, but Daenerys is kind and does not hold the find for ransom.

When her violet eyes search the campsite, it’s without reserve, without offense or anger. They crinkle as she smiles. “Arya. This is for you.”

If the _khalassar_ were capable holding its breath like some singular organism, no doubt it would. As it is, their furtive eyes merely steal glances at the girl-turned-knight, lips pinching with the effort to hold back curiosity. Why is a no-name Westerosi girl wearing armor, they must be wondering, and why is she part of the queen’s private guard?

Why does her hand tremble so as she takes the offered parchment?

Arya pays them no mind. She does not know the seal around the scroll, but Jon’s handwriting would be recognizable anywhere.

“Is it authentic?” Daenerys looks at Arya like most men look at Her Grace: intrigued but fearful, longing but reserved. The thought is foolish, the comparison at once dangerous and insipid. In the Common Tongue, the queen presses her: “Is it good news?”

Tongue-tied, Arya cants her head into a nod. But as she resumes her post and sets to unsaddling horses, she finds her heart pounding as wildly as the trampling of hooves locked inside her chest. She must have a brazier; she must burn the letter at once.

Behind her eyes, the inked words are not so easily erased: _Arya,_ they tell her, _it is safe. Come home._

***

Ser Jorah Mormont draws near after the day’s business is settled and the loot apportioned between bloodriders and guardsmen. His heavy footfalls are known for stirring fear and excitement in Arya’s soul, but her mind is elsewhere and she barely takes notice of his arrival until his hand is on her shoulder and the whetstone slips from her fingers to the cracked dirt.

“Are you well?” Mormont the Traitor, they called him back home, but here he is only a paltry lord commander of the newly formed queensguard. Only one man among many who thinks women are not fit for wielding swords or stringing bows.

Arya straightens her back, shamed to be caught daydreaming. “Well enough, ser. Am I needed?”

Mormont shakes his head. “No. The queen has retired to her tent with her handmaids. Her bloodriders keep her door.” That is good, Arya thinks. That is as it should be. The Dothraki are fearsome fighters and they will sooner lay down their lives than abandon their _khaleesi_. Of sellswords and freedmen draped in stolen armor, she cannot say the same.

The hand on her shoulder does not desist, but where in other men the gesture might be misconstrued as a threat or liberty taken without consent, under Ser Jorah’s fingers, Arya feels cautioned. “You should not doubt Her Grace’s desire to return to Westeros,” the disgraced knight tells her in the one language they share. “In time and with a proper army, she will restore us all to our rightful place. Keep faith.” Palpable concern drips from his voice, much like the reluctant reprimands that twisted her lord father’s lips when he caught Arya playing with swords or running mad around the castle, more boy than girl; more miscreant than blue blood.

His gentle reassurance, so much like Lord Eddard’s, is almost more than Arya can bear. She stands awkwardly, the heavy sword in her lap weighing on her narrow frame and scraping pathetically against the unpaved ground. “You mistake me, ser. I have nothing but faith in Her Grace.”

Faith and love, she thinks as the tent flap swings shut behind her, and how often they go hand in hand.

***

A fortnight past, as the horde sacked the slave city and took over its walls and keeps and temples, a sellsword found fault with her horse and tried to stab his way under her greaves. He never made it further than touching his sword point to the lobstered armor on Arya’s thigh before Aggo’s whip caught him around the throat and Arya shoved her axe into his belly. Another came at her from behind, but with Syrio for a dance teacher and the fear of death in her heart, she left him with a red smile and moved on.

The battle might have lasted hours or weeks; it’s all the same in war.

Later, as they searched the bodies for valuables and the women helped pile them into common graves, she found the piece of parchment hidden between skin and mail, its edges curled with sweat and the writing smudged with the sellsword’s life blood. She recognized the writing and the name, but in her panic, she dropped the thing into the pit along with the man’s bloodied clothes and dead horse. They kept the armor and the sword, though the queen’s bloodriders told her in their mongrel tongue that a big steel knife like that was not for a woman to wield.

“If you want it,” Arya heard herself laugh, “come and take it.” The steel flashed in the moonlight, still red with blood and dirt and an amber point of yellow rust. Something in her eyes told the Dothraki not to bother. She heard Rakkharo tell Irri, as they did their business outside the queen’s tent in the whispering silence of the night, that the Westerosi girl-boy had been shedding water for the dead—did that maybe mean she was a turncloak or a weakling?

Irri told him to stop talking so much and get on with it, the sounds of their coupling loud in the silent camp, and that was the end of that. For days, Arya expected to be pulled from her duties and brought before the queen, but either the Dothraki kept their doubts to themselves or Daenerys had no patience for rumors. Leaving behind wreckage and smoking fires tall enough to cloud even the brightest sun, the latter seemed a likely alternative.

But perhaps that wasn’t it at all.

The notion flares in Arya’s mind as she supervises the feeding hour. Perhaps the test was in letting the Westerosi half-warrior come forward herself. The Mother of Dragons is preoccupied by a great many problems and her time for nonsense is short. Freedmen keep the peace and feed her children, but there is always a member of the queensguard with them. Should someone die or a dragon escape, the fault will lie with Arya and her wandering thoughts.

Risk and hard work are a pressure she can bear. Not so suspicion.

***

The first missive came by raven, when she was still in Braavos. A plump maester from the Old Citadel took her arm while in the market place—a foolish gesture that very nearly cost him his life. Still young, still foolish enough to linger when she heard the language of her early years spoken by a man of learning, Arya lingered.

“A whisper from the north,” hissed the maester. “From your brother.”

She almost said, “I have no brother,” but that was Arry and the mouse-girl. Arya Stark was neither of those people and, in her bewilderment, she wrenched the scroll of parchment before the maester could undo all the work she’d put into crafting her new identity. His voice chased her as she ran through cobbled streets, but his words were all too quickly lost to the rolling of carts and the shouting of sailors descended from galleys and cogs, swan ships and pleasure barges. Arya ducked out of docks and into the quiet streets where someone with her face might have once sold oysters, past the temple where she might have once prayed for the death of a queen and into a tavern where she’d first heard talk of the Mother of Dragons.

It was there, with a cup of watered wine and Needle digging into her hip that she unrolled the scroll. _Dark wings,_ went the saying and dark were the words she read upon the parchment:

 _I pray to the old gods and the new to find you alive and well, wherever you have gone. Little sister, we are all that’s left. Come back to me. Come back to Winterfell…_

And signed in dark, dark ink was a name Arya could no more forget than she could disavow. _Jon Snow_.

She cut herself on her blade that night. Then morning came with a cold blue mist and one captain in thirteen agreed to take on Arry son of Yoren, to serve as crewman on the _Hotspur_. They lingered in port for a week and a day, but when they set off into the horizon, a fierce wind seized the ship’s sails and battered them about like leaves in autumn. Arya retched twice, then stopped eating altogether. She washed upon the shore on the wrong side of the Narrow Sea. Worse, she was taken in by the Lhazareen, whose gentle hands nursed her to health until the Dothraki cut them down.

It was there, between the stomping of hooves and the slashing of _arrakhs_ that she saw salvation through a fever dream: _Khaleesi_ , who rode in on a silver mare, with pinched lips and eyes as dark as onyx. Who birthed dragons and burned her own flesh upon her husband’s pyre. _Khaleesi_ , who did not flinch to hear her name spoken when Mormont the Traitor brought her forward.

“This one is Westerosi, princess. A daughter of the Usurper’s closest friend.” His hand had been a brutal claw against a young girl’s flesh, but Arya hadn’t cried. She’d spent her tears on Baelor’s effigy in King’s Landing. She hadn’t flinched, either, when a winged lizard with green scales had swept down from the queen’s shoulder to scent at her throat. His cold, leathery head had bumped her collarbones and clawed its feet harshly into Arya’s arm as he pulled himself upright.

Jorah Mormont drew back, uneasy, but not Arya. Two beady eyes and a warm breath didn’t scare her. She saw her own image mirrored in the glassy eyes: a head of tangled brown-reddish hair and more scars than she knew what to do with.

“My dragon likes you,” noted Daenerys, with no small degree of pleasure. “Are you come to kill me, then?”

“No.” Because she hadn’t and at eleven years of age, she had no notion why she might want to. (Things change.)

“Then what?”

“I was going home.” Arya hesitated. “To kill them all.”

She reflects as she moves through the camp that no child would have answered thusly; no assassin would have been so foolishly naive. But if she has failed in embracing the ways of godless sellswords and if she cannot honor her father’s memory as a daughter should, then at least her sword, her Needle, have proven to Daenerys that she is Arya Stark, the daughter of a traitor, the sworn shield of a queen in exile. And she thirsts for vengeance.

***

“You know it could be a trap,” Daenerys tells her as they sup on horsemeat and leeks stolen from the last city to be turned to dust. “My brother would tell me King’s Landing was a nest of vipers. He did not know much, but he was a young boy in the Seven Kingdoms before I was even born. He’s as good a mirror as I shall ever have of their treachery.”

Arya chases the stringy steak with watered wine. It is not often the queen has company in her tent, but of late she has expressed a desire for advice and entertainment, for bawdy Dothraki jokes and Mormont’s ill-recalled tales of Westerosi chivalry. Of Arya, she only asks for accounts of the north. Is it as vast as the books make it up to be? Is it true the winter snows sometimes rise as high as the walls of castles? What of the Wall?

“Aye, Your Grace.” Arya makes up what she does not know, embellishes what she cannot recall; she does not have to mask the truth when it comes to the letters that have reached her over the past moons. “It could be a trap--”

“But you do not think it likely.”

Daenerys runs a delicate hand through the coarse auburn mane bound with leather and string at her nape. It’s not quite a plait, nor does it ring with bells, but it’s still growing according to Dothraki custom for she’s as much murderer as any one of the _khaleesi_ ’s bloodriders. More, if she counts the boy in King’s Landing, who all but ran into her Needle. She started young.

A hand upon her wrist brings her reluctantly back to the present. “I can always tell when you think of home,” Daenerys is saying. “You frown as harshly as Viserys. He used to call it ‘waking the dragon’… should I call it ‘rousing the wolf maid?’”

“You could,” Arya allows, “but I am no maid.”

And Daenerys kisses her, warm and sweet like Arya has grown accustomed to finding this woman’s touch. For years, they roamed alone, prey to foreign hands and lustful gazes, but for these scattered moments in the queen’s tent, Arya forgets what solitude tastes like. Her hands fumble under the woven tunic Daenerys wears in favor of the corsets and bindings of Westerosi women, forcing her way under the laces, over the swell of a warm breast.

The queen always gives her these moments, content to stand back and let Arya disrobe her as they stumble their way to the pallet. Then Arya goes down, the breath knocked out of her, and skin slides against skin as Daenerys finds purchase on callused palms and shoves them to the ground. She is never gentle and she never asks permission, but when she takes Arya’s nipple in her mouth, she does so without the brutality of a man intent on taking. No doubt she fears bringing back uncomfortable memories, for herself or for Arya; it’s an assumption that doesn’t bear correcting.

Her linen shift tangles around her wrists, leaving her bare from head to waist and quivering all over. Daenerys takes time kissing every bruise and every scar, her breath tickling Arya as she worries a mottled mark along her navel. Her ribs are full of marks, her legs too, and on her back there is a jagged scar from where an _arrakh_ sliced her skin in battle not so long ago.

“Sparring with Rakkharo again, were you?” The queen laughs as her teeth bite marked skin, but a warning dances in her eyes all the same, half hidden behind a curtain of silvery-blonde hair.

 _She worries,_ Arya thinks suddenly. And then: _but does she worry for me or for him?_

There is no sense in wondering; what they share tonight and every other night is a piece of heaven wrested from the hands of the gods. It cannot last. It must not. And yet when Daenerys works her fingers under the laces of her tight breeches, Arya cannot help arch forward, her hips rising off the soft pallet with a desperate thrust.

Though burnt and reborn in the flames of a funerary pyre, Daenerys has the softest hands Arya has ever felt. Softer even than Sansa or her mother, or the soft fur on Nymeria’s belly. Her touch makes it easy to forget all else, to fumble helplessly within the queen’s clothes until they are in a similar state of disheveled nudity, pale to dark, satin to callus. And Daenerys is still looming above her—always above, never on her back—dancing in and out of her hands like the flames in the brazier.

Arya imagines what it might be like to put her hand inside the fire, to feel it consume her inch by inch as she surrenders. She’s much too proud to try; she fears failure.

She doesn’t fear the hand that grips her own, short nails digging into the wrist as Daenerys ruts against her. Firelight dances on her skin, over her pebbled nipples and her braided hair, over the stretch marks that have never quite faded and the soft mound of pale hair that tickles Arya’s fingers every time she buries them deep within. Daenerys embraces her with her thighs, a woman caught in the throes of her own pleasure, but her eyes always close as she nears the edge.

Just once, Arya prays she will look. Just once, so she may know her _khaleesi_ is thinking of her as her moans pitch high and desperate and her body tightens on the cusp of a shudder.

Too soon—always, too soon—it’s over and Daenerys crumbles in a long limbed sprawl, her skin shiny with sweat and her sweet breaths tinged with exhaustion. Arya wraps her arms tightly over the queen’s shoulders and pulls her in. Once she is recovered, Daenerys will bid her finish while she watches; she likes to watch. If the time is ripe and her thoughts are anchored in the present, she will allow Arya to fall asleep, entangled and serene, only to be woken come morning by one of the queen’s Dothraki maids. Or else, she will tell her to leave while she weeps for the husband she lost.

Arya knows better than to try and sway the queen.

“Oh, sweetling…” Daenerys struggles for breath and self-control, but spoken so close to Arya’s ear, her words cannot be misunderstood. “Do you mean to leave me?”

It’s one of those nights, then; and Arya is required to trample her own heart for the queen’s peace. “No,” is whispered, “my place is here.” _With you_. There is nothing to be done about the devotion she bears this distant enemy, this woman she has come to love.

In her dreams that night, Arya sees only fire licking at the gates of a castle she once called home.


End file.
